Bet you know the feeling. You’ve been sitting in the pub or restaurant waiting for someone for almost an hour. You knew that they were going to be late because they have always been late, right from the day you first met them.

No one was ever surprised when they turned up late for work because they were almost always late for that, too.

People would say, “Oh it’s only Joe,” (or Fred, or Harry), and that would be that.

I have a real dread of keeping people waiting. If I say that I will meet you in the Market Place at noon, then, if I am not striding towards you by the twelfth stroke of the Guildhall clock, it will be because I’ve been standing there since half-past eleven.

Is Anton still waiting until the Guildhall clock?

It was the way I was brought up. It was drilled into me that being late is a selfish act. It puts your needs before the needs of others.

It tells them that you undervalue them.

I’m always early for everything, always setting out before I really need to so that I won’t leave the other party waiting. Of course, if they are inordinately late then that only adds to the amount of time that you’re then left feeling like a chump, and that will cause resentment.

More than anything, being late strains relationships. It is a rotten feeling, hanging around waiting ages for someone. I saw a car sticker the other day: “Always late, but worth the wait.” What an arrogant overestimation of one’s worth.

Being late might give you the extra amount of time that you want, but it steals that time from someone else.

I often think of what Arnold Bennett wrote in How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day: “It has been said that time is money. That proverb understates the case. Time is a great deal more than money.

“If you have time you can obtain money – usually. But though you have the wealth of a cloakroom attendant at the Carlton Hotel, you cannot buy yourself a minute more time than I have, or the cat by the fire has.”

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We'll drink to that! Pub and bar stories from across Derbyshire

If someone is careless about time, about what else are they careless? Benjamin Franklin – he once strolled down Iron Gate, by the way, on a visit to clock-maker John Whitehurst – told an employee who was habitually late but always had an excuse: “I have generally found that the man who is good at an excuse is good for nothing else.”

If someone keeps you waiting for an unreasonable amount of time, then the best thing to do is … well, just leave. Have the courtesy to text, of course. But don’t bother with a white lie, an excuse, an invented matter of great urgency.

Just say that you’re not waiting any longer. It can feel quite liberating, and you never know, for them the penny may drop. To turn around the old phrase – better never than late …